Anissa Patel, a rising junior and Robert W. Woodruff Scholar in Emory College of Arts and Sciences, has won a $7,000 scholarship from the Udall Foundation in recognition of her leadership and service on environmental issues.
A double major in environmental sciences and philosophy, politics and law, Patel is Emory’s fifth recipient of the national award. She is among 55 Udall Scholars who will meet this summer to share innovative ideas in conservation, environmental issues and Native American policy.
“What drove me to apply for the Udall was the opportunity to learn what creative climate solutions other people want to try,” Patel says. “What is going on now isn’t really working, so I think thoughtful engagement with other people will help find new solutions.”
Patel has been interested in environmental policy since high school, when she advocated for green jobs legislation in her native Massachusetts.
She continued that advocacy this spring, when she was among a dozen students from Sunrise Emory who urged the state Public Service Commission to reject Georgia Power’s latest energy plan.
Patel’s also has expanded her hands-on research at Emory. She conducts qualitative climate work in associate professor Jola Ajibade’s climate resilience and transformations lab in the Department of Environmental Sciences. Patel also also finds time to research and write legal memos for Emory Law School professor Mark Nevitt.
“She does so much incredible work, I don’t know when she sleeps,” says Nevitt, whose work focuses on environmental law and its connections to national security. “I think the sky is really the limit for her remarkable drive and brain.”
Nevitt said Patel contributed significantly to his Vanderbilt Law Review paper on breaking the repetitive pattern of communities rebuilding after disasters, despite facing further destruction from climate change.
Ajibade was similarly impressed when, as as her first assessment of Patel’s capabilities, she requested a literature review on the relationship between heat waves and marginalized communities.
Patel turned in a paper that incorporated communities across the U.S. and Asia, an assessment of how heat affects different people, such as the elderly and farmworkers, and even suggested strategies for adaptation.
“That was the first project, and now I can tell her what needs to be done and then watch a miracle happen,” Ajibade says.
She has since assigned Patel projects to examine how natural disasters can compound one another and even a book chapter comparing government regional resilience plans in the global South with residents’ experiences of recovery. “Anissa is on another level,” Ajibade adds.
Patel will continue other work beyond in addition to the Udall engagement this summer.
In June, she is presenting at Science for Georgia’s conference on climate protection, sharing research she conducted while taking Ajibade’s climate solutions course.
She is also working in Atlanta with the Community Building and Social Change (CBSC) fellowship, which integrates academic learning with community engagement. Her project with the Partnership for Southern Equity focuses on green jobs as workforce development in Atlanta’s Peoplestown neighborhood.
Patel will resume her campus research in the fall, when she is also working with the University Senate’s Committee on the Environment.
She will juggle the work as always, along with participating in the Suri A Cappella group and making plans to prepare for law school.
“For me, the law is the way to make the greatest amount of change in the rooms I want to be in,” Patel says. “I’ve found through the people and my work at Emory that my passion is to find equitable community solutions to our shared cost of climate change.”